# Vector store-backed retriever

A vector store retriever is a retriever that uses a vector store to retrieve documents. It is a lightweight wrapper around the vector store class to make it conform to the retriever interface.
It uses the search methods implemented by a vector store, like similarity search and MMR, to query the texts in the vector store.

Once you construct a vector store, it's very easy to construct a retriever. Let's walk through an example.

import Example from "@snippets/modules/data_connection/retrievers/how_to/vectorstore.mdx"

<Example/>
